Can You Cheat On Psychometric Personality Tests?

06 Jul Can You Cheat On Psychometric Personality Tests?

What You Need to Know About Taking a Personality Test For A Job Interview

Most of us will be faced with taking at least one psychometric test at some point in our careers. I recently had the fascinating experience of taking my Level A and B in psychometric testing, allowing me to conduct psychometric tests myself, both for my personal clients and for organisations wanting them for their staff.

First off, let me explain that there are two sorts of psychometric tests: aptitude and personality. Aptitude tests measure a particular skill. This could be verbal reasoning, numeracy, spatial awareness or error checking for instance. They’ve been designed to assess what level you work at under pressure. This supposedly gives your best potential score, and that’s why the tests are always timed. Your results will specifically show how well you performed on the test, but are nothing more than that. It’s easy to be objective with these type of tests, and organisations will often set a cut off point where they only consider people who achieved a certain level. A famous aptitude test would be the IQ test.

The other type of psychometric tests, and the ones we are talking about today, are personality tests and these can be very different. Some may put you into categories (Ann is this type of persona, who likes x), some may produce a whole breakdown of your personality and approach to life in general, while others are focused on the workplace alone, and this is the one I have been trained in.

So, can you cheat at a personalty test? My reply to this is…why would you want to? During the consultancy stages the test conductor/facilitator will analyse a job specification from the potential employer, looking particularly at what skill sets are needed for the job on offer. But there is more to it than that. The organisation may well be looking for a certain type of person, to find into a certain environment, or do highly specialised tasks. If you are answering your psychometric questions in the way you think you should be, just to impress your potential employer, you run the risk of finding yourself in a job or environment that may not be suitable for you. Think of it as a way of matching, rather than filtering. If they place a high regard on being meticulous and details orientated, yes you can pretend you are, but you may well find yourself doing highly detailed (and boring) work that you hate. So, why cheat if you run the risk of ending up with something you don’t want?

Also, many of these tests have been honed to actually indicate where there is a possibility that someone is “cheating”, or even scoring themselves too high if it’s a self scoring test. The test results won’t say definitively that you’ve cheated but it may put a dark cloud over your head or inspire some very vigorous questioning.

However, I agree that personality tests can be daunting. They may also reveal things you’d rather not know! One way around this is to get used to taking psychometric tests and become comfortable with the process. This is a really useful website here.

I now work with individuals who may be job hunting or just interested in their own career and personal development, who can take a psychometric test, getting used to the process, and then receive full feedback (in person or via Skype) on the results. This means that you can get to work on any area of development that you feel needs work, or use the results to point you towards a job or career where you will feel the happiest. Your own psychometric personality test comes as part of my coaching package, or you can also order one at £250 for a basic test, £299 for a more detailed option. Contact me to book.